Amazon Prime

[Harrison]

Are you an Amazon Prime member?

Do you take advantage of everything this monthly subscription includes? I've been a mender for years, ever since Grand Tour was about to launch.

Like many I consider it great value for the free Amazon Prime shipping. The Prime video is considered a free bonus. It occassionally has something worth watching, but it's definitely not a go to streaming service like Netflix or Disney+.

But Amazon are fairly aloof about the other benefits you get as a Prime subscriber, and often you stumble across them by accident, or receive a random email from Amazon about not missing a monthly perk you didn't know existed.

The first example is one most will know about, and that is Amazon Music. Similar to, but not as good as, Netflix. To gain full access you have to take a seperate subscription. But as a Prime member you already have access to a smaller 10% selection of the total music library.

The next is Kindle Unlimited. This is less known to many. The full Kindle Unlimited subscription gives you access to over a million ebooks. This includes not just novels and non fiction, but also magazines and other printed books. But Amazon Prime members also have access to a smaller portion of this same library. About 100k ebooks if I remember correctly. And it works the same as Kindle Unlimited. You can browse the library and borrow up to 10 books at any one time. Returning some to borrow more. Personally I think this is a very ckunky and awkward system that is unnecessary. It's also buggy. It doesn't always let you add an included book to your library or unghost the download. And you can't always remove a book to clear it so you can add a new one. I just don't see the point in this system. What is the reason for restricting the number? I can't really see one on digital media. It should be like game subscriptions. Add whatever and download as many as you like whilst your subscription is active. Just make it hard to use.

The next is a bonus for Prime members that I only discovered last year. It's called First Reads. Each month Kindle will publish a page called First Reads that will highlight up to 10 newly released novels. As a Prime member you can pick one from this list to keep free. And this month is 2 books. Worth a look as they are free and included in your subscription.

Thy final one I will mention so far is Prime Gaming. Now this is one not many k ow about or will ever of heard about. You won't easily find it by visiting Amazon and its almost like they want to keep it secret.

Amazon have a dirisl gaming library called Amazon Gaming. And as a Prime member each month they give away a few PC games for you to add to your Amazon gaming library. To download and play on your PC a and when you want. A bit like the old PS Plus or Xbox Gold subscriptions that have you free games each month. You have to claim them that month to add them to your library, but get to keep and pay them forever. Just go to Amazon and search for Amazon gaming to find the homepage.

Any other benefits of being an Amazon Prime member I've firgotten?

Looking at the benefits it's not actually a bad price at all. You don't get access to the whole music or Kindle libraries, but you do have access to about 10% of them. And we all know it's a marketting ploy to entice you to subscribe to the full package.

[Harrison]

The one part of Amazon a Prime membership doesn't offer any access to is Audible. Not sure why they don't offer some free audio books as a Prime member as an incentive, but they are kept seperate.

I've subscribed to Audible for a long time. I don't really have time to read that many novels but I do adorns 2 hours each day travelling to work, so can listen to audio books and therefore up to 10 hours a week, so completely most books in 2 weeks. It quicker if I also listen whilst walking thy dog.

The monthly Audible subscription gives you 1 credit that you can use to purchase any audio book on Audible, regardless of price, and you can purchase 3 additional credits for £18. Full price audio books can vary from a frw pounds to over £40, so the credits work out a far better way to buy the books.

In addition last year Audible also added a menbers library, with other 1000 audio books free to subscribers. That's a nice bonus and there if a wide range if books available.

Another service I thought worth mentioning is Readly. This isn't owned by Amazon but you can subscribe to it from within your Amazon account to keep everything in one place, or seprately from their own website or app. It's a monthly digital magazine subscription. I used to subscribe to individual digital magazine subscriptions but there is no need any more for the majority of magazines.

Readly is like the Netflix or Gamepass of Magazines. You pay one monthly subscription and gain access to over 6000 different magazine and all of their back issues. Every magazine I used to subscribe to is included in the one price. You can add as many different magazines to your library and download as many issues to read as you want.

As soon as I teied this out I cancelled my Kindle Unlimited subscription because I was mainly using that to read magazines, and as mentioned it has a very bad design with the 10 book lending system. That meant to go back and reread an old magazine or book you had ro return (remove) one if your 10 books to add a different one. Just stupid. With Readly you just go to the magazine, find the issue you want to read, and read it. Simple.

[Demon Cleaner]

I have Amazon Prime because of the shipping from Germany, where I order 99% of my stuff, is free. That includes also the streaming service, which we use almost as much as Netflix for some series.

[Kin Hell]

Yes. :yesyes:

[J T]

Yes I am a member, and no I don't use the full range of benefits from it.

I only signed up so I could quickly get Lady T a Kindle for her birthday (at short-ish notice). I probably should cancel it soon.

[Harrison]

If you have a Kindle then there are a lot of ebooks induced in Prime. But the full Kindle Unlimited is worth the price if she reads a lot.

[Harrison]

Amazon continue to sneak new features into Prime membership without really promoting them.

One I've used for a while is Deliveroo Plus, which gives you free dekivery on orders over a certain amount.

And one I just discovered is Odeon Cinema 2 tickets for £10. This is once per month. However Sky now offer 2 free tickets each month to Vue Cinemas, so that's a better deal, although if you want to go twice in a month this is a useful option. I also get discount cinema tickets from Royal Mail. I really should take advantage of all these more.

There is also unlimited full resolution photo storage which I never use. Really should as the Google one does degrade your pictures. The Prime one also includes 5GB free video storage.

[Kin Hell]

It's all getting a tad crap tbh. Gotta pay 3 bucks a month to stop Adverts now.

YouTube are just as bad & then still screw you with adverts even though you subscribed to stop the adverts. :mad:

How do you mean "Google One degrade your pictures?"

[Harrison]

Google doesn't save your original images. It decompressed them to make them smaller files, which degrades the image quality.

[J T]

Yes I am a member, and no I don't use the full range of benefits from it.

I only signed up so I could quickly get Lady T a Kindle for her birthday (at short-ish notice). I probably should cancel it soon.


Still haven't cancelled the Prime subscription, it's this pro-active and dynamic approach to managing financial waste that Lady T loves me for :rolleyes:

[Kin Hell]

Google doesn't save your original images. It decompressed them to make them smaller files, which degrades the image quality.

Guessing you mean;

Google One "Compresses" them to degrade the image quality. - This is similar to MP3 compression & the loss of Quality of Signal/Sound for doing so.

[Harrison]

Yep. Jpeg compression.

You can get away with compression in a lot of audio far more than images and video where compression causes instant noise and halo fringing adding big differences in contrast. It also knocks down the greyscale levels, meaning the contrast is reduced, causing slightly more washed out images and less blacks.

The problem is many consumers now view images and watch videos almost exclusely on mobile phones, tablets and modern TVs which mostly now have higher contrast screens that boost colours and contrast, so most don't really notice these degradations. But it instantly becomes apparent if you then try to print them.

For me image compression is quite noticeable as I've worked with image editing for a very long time. But for most they just don't notice it. Similar to audiophiles who can instantly hear a digitally compressing and clipped audio file over an uncompressed version.

[J T]

There's certainly a trade off between quality and convenience.

Personally, as most of my photos are quick phone-snapshots of events, I accept the loss of quality. I do like that Google Photos backs up automatically, so if something happens to my phone I won't lose all the pics. I also love the automatic things it does like making collages, memories (this day 5 years ago, or the holiday to X, now-and-then flashbacks). It's a very quick type of photo 'consumption' though, so it's very modern and in some ways a little superficial - but then again, how often do I pull out the old-fashioned photoalbums of physical prints? Not often.

[Harrison]

True. We make photobooks of holidays or special events. We also used to make a yearly calendar with pictures of Tom for the Grandparents, but each month now would just be him playing a video game or at his computer.

[J T]

Ah, we've been meaning to do stuff like that but never get round to it and then, the moment and the desire has passed.

My sister in law is quite diligent at doing photobooks, when we do a big trip back the UK she makes one for us. It's nice, but how often do we look at them, not all that often really. She also has a tendencey to try and cram as many photos in as possible be they good or not so good, whereas I'd rather just have a smaller number of brilliant photos.

[Kin Hell]

I say kill a few more trees, add some chemicals to the paper for a Glossy finish, print their Asses clean off from squeezed Chameleon juice & then throw them into a plastic Photo Album from China that looks like a 100 year old piece of Leather!
These antiquated Chinese Photo Albums are a fraction of the price of BHS, Cavendish House and M&S ones, so you can afford even more squeezed Chameleon juice on Glossy chemical impregnated paper & sod the trees that give us Oxygen to breathe! - Job done!

Then at Christmas time or when the Outlaws pop round, you can paw over the glossy prints protected by fuzzy plastic sheets whilst drinking tea & scoffing shitty dry "Rich Tea" biscuits that make you cough your nuts up if they go down the wrong hole....

You just can't beat old School. :lol:

PS - The real skill here is flipping the fuzzy plastic sheet back over the glossy prints before the coughed up Rich Tea biscuit hits the glossy prints! :shades:

[Harrison]

I detect some pessimistic sarcasm there Charlie. That's not like you! :p:lol:

Paper these days in the west at least is made from sustainable pine forests so no real destruction of natural trees. And they are now utilising bamboo more now which is super fast growing for paper.

We don't use the old fashioned photo albums. We make photo books online and then get the books printed and shipped. These are great for things like weddings and big holidays. Are we have some great memories of when Tom was young. Best pictures of the year in one of these books with the year printed on the spine. And we do look through them fairly often. One from a holiday in New York in 2006 is great because it was the biggest snow blizzard they had in decades the day after we arrived so there are some amazing photos in there of Everingham covered in 3 foot of snow.

Plus we get canvas prints done for the best photos to go on the wall. I took a couple of really nice photos of Tom when he was really young that look great.

Problem now with everything being 100% digital is we are losing memories. We never looked though photos much but they were there to reminisce when we did. Many houses now sunny have any ohotos on display. That's a bit sad. As a photographer I want to see more large scale epic canvas prints on walls showing the best moments of people's lives.

[Kin Hell]

Not in the slightest Dave! :rolleyes:

Always the optimist this side of the fence! :lol:

Digital Photo Storage can hold a huge pile of unnecessary data that isn't required for stunning 4K Quality. When you're hitting 100Mb+ for a RAW data image, that's some serious stuff.
But if your using a powerful Telescope taking pictures of specific areas of the Andromeda Galaxy, you need hundreds/thousands of shots whilst tracking as the Earth rotates to achieve stunning results. - Look up Jon Chard on Facebook to see what I mean. - I can't link anyone because I'm not on Facebook.

I don't do Social Media.

[Harrison]

Large photos do take up a lot of space, especially when you also store a RAW file with the Jpeg. Higher end smartphones offer that ability that days but I bet hardly anyone actually knows what they are and how to use them. I've been utilising RAW files for a very long time. Photoshop added built in support about 10 or so years ago. They are great files as you are not restricted by the limited contrast, light balance, saturation etc as they are the camera sensor's raw data, whereas every image you normally see on a phone or camera has alteady been processed and filtered by the onboard processing.

And yeah, those deep space radio telescope require a huge volume of storage. That single image released recently showing one area of the sky in great detail used Petabytes of data. I can't imagine the setup needed to actually process that data and create the final image. You couldn't load it in any home system. It would need a server farm.

[Kin Hell]

<snip>

And yeah, those deep space radio telescope require a huge volume of storage. That single image released recently showing one area of the sky in great detail used Petabytes of data. I can't imagine the setup needed to actually process that data and create the final image. You couldn't load it in any home system. It would need a server farm.

Not quite Dave....

https://astrobackyard.com/best-astrophotography-telescopes/

The telescope has to be locked on to the North Star & then be capable of tracking to compensate for the rotation of Earth through GPS. This then allows a High Resolution & Quality Camera to take snapshots of the same relative spot in Space from our planet.
All the captured Images are then run through Lightroom & exposed to each colour of the see-able spectrum to build up the finished picture. Hours upon hours of work using high End PC's provide satisfactory results. - It's a dedication most folk couldn't begin to appreciate.

If you use Facebook, I do recommend you look up Jon Chard and see some of the fantastic Photos he's captured. Particular areas within the Andromeda Galaxy are just mind blowing & if that doesn't float your boat, some of his photos of our own Milky Way Galaxy are equally as stunning. Looking up at a night sky from the New Forrest in Holbury (Near Southampton) shows a clear band of stars that make up the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy we are a part of. - Just Phenomenal! :shades:

Equally, his wildlife shots & family shots of two beautiful daughters are just as breath taking in their own rights.

[Harrison]

I was referring to the James Webb telescope which is in deep space and not effected by Earth rotation. It orbits the sun, not the Earth. And it's images take a lot more to process than most images captured by a traditional telescope.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/articles/how-are-webbs-full-color-images-made

BTW, I know many do use Lightroom, and I have as a glorified image library tool since it launched, but it's no replacement for Photoshop to really work on an image. Lightroom has recently seen a big update that has added some much needed extra features and abilities, but if you have been using Photoshop for years it feels like trying to edit images with a hand tied behind your back.

[Harrison]

BTW, your link has made me remember I was going to look into getting a proper T ring DSLR adapter for my telescope and Canon camera. To date I've just used an eyepiece adapter that came with my telescope. It does work but not like having the camera using the scope like an actual lens attached directly. I have managed some great images of the moon this way and some images of Saturn. But my telescope isn't that great. Just a starter one that was a couple of hundred to use with my son. Really want one I can hook up to a computer and have a proper tracking tripod head. But that's expensive.

[J T]

What are your pictures of Saturn like?

[Harrison]

I've not got around to trying Saturn properly yet. We did see it through the telescope but not taken any pictures.

Just looked it up and it's most visible in August when it will be the closest to us. Need to remember that and try to get some good shots.